Kernal Protection Failure?

Question

Hello.
I am running a macbook 2G/2G, and I have recently done a fresh clean install with leopard, and have updated to 10.5.5. Many of my applications are hanging and unresponsive, and my mac is just running slowly overall. I have had alot of problems with Word 2004--it keeps telling me that my disk is full, and won't let me save, even though when I close all other applications (I have ~30G hard drive space left) . I also have problems with Safari, Mail sometimes, VLC player, VMWare Fusion, etc. When I send the problems to Apple, I often see "Kernal Protection Failure" in the dialog box, along with significant hang times. How serious is this, and what can I do to make my Mac run like it should?
Thank you

Answer 1

Did you do an Erase and Install of Leopard or did you do an Upgrade Install or Archive and Install? Have you tried the following:
Repairing the Hard Drive and Permissions
Boot from your OS X Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger and Leopard.) After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer. Now restart normally.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior (4.0 for Tiger, and 4.1 for Leopard) and/or TechTool Pro (4.6.1 for Leopard) to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.